Sputterpub's Blog

All in all, he had been attracted to her but comfortable with no action. Until the prospect came of making her up. In the week between booking the appointments and her noon arrival that Saturday, he started having explicit, exciting, and disturbing ideas about nasty sex with Pamela.

After the rowing machine that big morning, Brian moved to the bike, the weight room, and a quick tour of the Nautilus equipment, but his mind wasn’t on his workout. He thought about a dark red tint on Pamela’s hair, burgundy tones on lips and nails, greens and coppers around that face. He worked out in a state of near arousal.

Pamela was on time and of course they started with the massage. Each took awhile relaxing into it, she because of her excitement about her possible evening after the makeover and he because he was kneading the skin and muscles of the woman he was about to spend hours adorning. Pamela even commented that his hands felt warmer than usual. He spent extra time on her neck, and she melted becomingly.

After the massage came the facial. Then he applied color to her hair, which cool sensation she found enchanting, and while the dye sat on her head, Brian gave her feet and hands his professional attention.

By the time he’d shampooed her, trimmed her hair, and styled it, Pamela was feeling good. Her body was relaxed, her hands and feet felt light and smooth and slim, and she began to like the look of her face. Her hair tumbled about in big, rich curls; she loved it. She then watched Brian apply foundation, color, powder, and all manner of balms around her eyes, and it was like seeing someone airbrush a photograph: the flaws just disappeared.

She looked gorgeous even before she put on the green velvet gown and cape. After she dressed she was spectacular. Even she could see it. Then Brian decided the cape was a bit too long. Most people would have let it go, but he was fastidious about those things. He had a ticket to the reception so he’d be there, and he wanted her to be perfect. He insisted that they take the time to alter the cape, and he provided someone to do it: a college student who was studying costume design, and who was going to the same event that evening.

There’s no telling what might have happened if Pamela hadn’t stopped to have the cape shortened. She might have gone on to a fabulous evening and then a life with Brian. But as it was she spent an hour with a young seamstress. As it was, the seamstress was Ted’s daughter Beth. As it was, Ted moved in fast when he saw the made-over Pamela and Pamela, not loving him, yet found his ardor irresistible. Brian found no opportunity to declare himself.

Short, divorced Ted started seeing Pamela after that. She continued to come to Brian for her massages, and he might have spoken up during one of those, but that felt too complicated. Pamela arrived clean for their appointments. That’s the way Brian liked her, clean and nude under the white robe or the massage sheet. He just wasn’t inspired to speak.

Meanwhile, Pamela dodged a bullet and missed a path. Her company was downsizing and she was terrified at the idea of being laid off. She dug in and began working extra hard, putting in long hours, showing her boss Ted just how dedicated she could be. She succeeded in keeping her position, but she also conditioned Ted to expect all that labor. If she had been laid off, she would have landed at e-Den.com, and she would have enjoyed their subsequent and famous success. She would have had time to write.

As it was, she worked harder and internalized more stress. Ted was smart but driven, and he demanded a lot from her. He was short – not more than an inch taller than her five foot six – and he had a Napoleonic way of compensating for his lack of height. He was divorced (four times so far), so he had plenty of time to work and expected it of those around him. Pamela’s neck was almost permanently stiff and her sleep became disturbed. She went to the spa as often as she could find any time, for one of Brian’s therapeutic massages, and she began to wonder about him. Even though he was a large man – six feet tall and big-boned – Pamela assumed he was gay. It wasn’t just where he worked; although the cosmetics/personal indulgence field has at least as high a gay percentage as the entertainment industry, straight people can certainly be found. It was Brian’s fastidious habits, his incisive observations about faces and bodies, his conversation about makeup and clothes. He crossed his legs at the knees. He sampled massage oils on his wrist and had a way of then sniffing them, a way even of checking his own pulse when he was exercising, that wasn’t very masculine.

Pamela told herself it didn’t matter what Brian’s orientation was; she only wanted to continue to be massaged by him. He was at least six or seven years younger than she, anyway. But she was lonely. It got to where she was considering the expense and confession of a dating service.

She arranged to get a facial as well as a massage from Brian. Then she threw hesitation to the wind and asked if she could get a full makeover. She booked appointments for massage, manicure, pedicure, facial, hair cut and color and styling, and makeup. It would be a full afternoon, and she intended to go to a formal opera reception and dinner dance, alone if she couldn’t find a date, afterwards.

Brian would perform all of the treatments. That was his idea; he took Pamela’s call and he arranged the calendar. He was simultaneously excited and apprehensive about the afternoon.

After his experience with the Black Widow, he said he didn’t like makeup and adornments. He often amused himself by visualizing everyone around him without their clothes and jewelry. This wasn’t a voyeuristic or pornographic hobby, and he received no sexual stimulation from it. It’s just that he was fascinated by the human form, no matter what its shape, and he only trusted clean nudity.

What drew him to Pamela was her wonderful clarity. Even though all of his spa clients came to him fresh from the pool or tub or shower, Pamela had an extra shine about her. Maybe it was her freckled skin or the glints in her curly brown hair, but it probably had more to do with her direct personality and open-featured face: Pamela acted clean. He liked that.

If it weren’t for the fact that she talked about men, Brian might have thought she was gay. She didn’t act mannish, but hers was a strong personality, she had perpetually clean fingernails, and there was nothing coquettish about her. He knew she’d never been of those shrieky-eeky females, squealing and jumping around when she saw a girlfriend, never going to a public bathroom alone. He knew without asking that she’d always been good at science. And she had a brusque, take-charge-and-fix-it attitude that he usually only saw in nurses and lesbians. But over time she talked enough that he knew she was straight, and once she booked the makeover appointment, he understood that she was getting serious about finding someone.

Most of the time Pamela didn’t think about Brian. She came to the day spa as often as her schedule permitted: about every three weeks. Brian gave the best massage she’d ever had, so she gratefully considered him immediately before, during and after a visit, but otherwise, she tended to be too busy to think of anything but items on her to-do list and an exhausted future of loneliness, and to be too full of those subjects to notice any opportunities around her. Just a week earlier, for example, she was barreling along on an afternoon walk to get exercise and bagels, striding fast and head forward as usual. She didn’t notice her surroundings or even the people she passed. She had just exchanged automatic greetings with a bearded man working in his garden when she tripped on an uneven bit of sidewalk. She didn’t fall (she didn’t have time to fall, she told herself as she recovered from her stumble and kept pacing). She walked on unknowing that if she had fallen, the bearded man would have come to her assistance, and they would have met, and her future would have been entirely more pleasant.

Brian generally knew all this about Pamela but it didn’t diminish his interest. He’d been at least theoretically attracted to her since he met her a year earlier when he took the job at the spa. She was smart. She was funny. She was complicated. She was safe. He even liked it that she was seven years his senior; that felt comfortable. But he hadn’t done anything about his attraction. He was still recovering.

Eight years before, Brian had been an up-and-coming stock broker. Twenty-seven years old, good enough looking, moving around at light speed and making over a hundred thousand a year. He had a succession of girlfriends and he liked every one of them, but he never fell in love. Maybe he was overly fastidious, but something about each one of his girlfriends prevented even his infatuation: bad toes, a way of pursing her mouth that showed him how ugly her future wrinkles would be, a habit of sucking her teeth… Until Barbara.

They were introduced at a fundraiser for the symphony. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Glossy black hair, creamy skin, warm blue lash-fringed eyes, crimson mouth and nails, slender wrists and ankles, narrow hands, and a way about her, an elegant magnetism. Brian thought her perfect. He fell in love.

Barbara was from Texas, a young widowed mother with a nine-year old adorable daughter. The investigators hadn’t yet caught up with her.

She was so charming, lovely, and glamorous that she managed to get Brian to pay for her condominium and her daughter’s private school and feel that it was his idea, all in a year and a half when she only actually fucked him four times.

Brian’s friends became concerned about him. They noted his obsession and were helpless to alter his behavior, but they rallied round and tried to comfort him when Barbara suddenly left town. The men from Texas told them that the lovely widow had lost not one but two husbands, actually, both rich and both possibly poisoned, and at the very least, she had questions to answer. But by then Brian was close to filing for bankruptcy.

His heart was even more mangled than his net worth. He didn’t have the hustle to stay in the financial district. He thought he’d be a doctor and even enrolled in some pre-med courses, but he soon realized that he couldn’t afford the long course of study. He diverted himself into anatomy, physical therapy, yoga and cosmetology classes, while working as a masseur and facialist. He grew critical about glamor. But he argued with himself about that. Try as he might to lose it, Brian remained very susceptible to well-applied makeup, nail polish, and lingerie. Perfume got to him. He felt safest with women at his work, who came to his massage table clean and white-robed, without all the ornaments. But he couldn’t lose those fantasies.